In recent years it has become more and more common for persons to share data over networks; however, transmission of data has a cost in terms of bandwidth utilization. Therefore, large amounts of data, for example, are often compressed. Compression may also be used, for example, in storing data on magnetic or other media, in transferring data from one component to another within a computing platform, and/or in transferring data to and/or from a peripheral device to and/or from a computing platform.